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The Twitter Book: Must-Read Book for Simple, Practical Advice

This is one book that I'm definitely taking with me on the big move, but I'm also giving away a copy too. (I got one free copy because my tweets are featured on pages 121 and 159). Anyway, this small book about Twitter is packed with simple, practical advice for getting you up to speed quickly. It is one of better designed how-to tech books I've ever seen.

It's a quick read, I read it in an hour. But it is real value is as reference to keep by your desktop. It's the most easily digestible, least complex technical book I've read in a long time.

The text is almost haiku like, illustrated with example tweets. I think of it as a kinda Strunk and White for Twitter with brevity, wit, great examples, and simplicity.Each color coded section covers:

Getting Started

Listening

Conversations

Sharing Information and Ideas

Reveal Yourself

Twitter for Business

This book is not only of value for those of us in the weeds using Twitter everyday, but also a great book to put on your manager's desk. I've been using Twitter now for three years and been following the conversation about how to use this tool, so I thought I would not learn much new. However, I learned so much because of the zen-like simplicity of the book's design. But, the book also inspired me to improve my Twitter use. How many technical how to books inspire you?

What I like most about the book is the information design and the more is less approach. There's plenty of white space - it is fun to read. I like the smaller size too. It's also filled with visuals which is really good for someone like me who is an off the charts visual learner.

I'm keeping my copy, but I have one to give away on this blog. So, if you want to win a copy, leave me a comment answering this question:

How is your organization currently using Twitter? What are your objectives? What audience do you want to reach? How are you measuring success?

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Hey Beth, great idea, and thanks for being so willing to share your wealth of knowledge all the time. We here at Samaritan's Purse are just now starting to use Twitter. It is kind of fractured with various areas using it to keep their constituency informed of upcoming events, news, and general information. It is really a communication tool for us with short posts of relevant information. Not worried about metrics at this point. Maybe because we just haven't figured out how to yet. Or what to measure.

I attended O'Reilly's webinar promoting this book, speakers were Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly founder) and Sarah Milstein (Twitter user #12). It was a great webinar and had some great ideas from the CEO and user perspective. I'm looking forward to getting a copy of this book!

Thanks Beth. I am in or involved with several organizations using twitter.

1. PeopleBrowsr which is a dashboard for social media. Objective is to make social media accessible in one space with lots of easy reporting, filtering, and connecting. We want to reach any social media users, especially power users. We measure success in multiple ways - # of users surely, but also tracking any and all feedback across social media spaces - (and giving prompt replies). We are a community-driven software project going beta this week.

2. Net Tuesday Chicago which is a space to share and learn about using social media for nonprofits in the Chicago area. We want to reach nonprofit folks interested and using social media. We measure success in a couple ways - attendance, surely, but also feedback and proportion of people who return month after month.

There are several others, but that is a good start. :)

For myself, I am using twitter to stay connected with people I have met and to discover new people. My audience is people who are interested in developing a thrivable world. And for myself, I have not started measuring success yet in a tangible numeric way. I do know that the connections have been powerful, even life changing. I have retained clients, met partners, and discovered friends (and their wisdom) that I would not have found any other way.

Thanks for sharing. You certainly have me interested in the book! I could use it in some curriculum I am developing.

My company is not using Twitter, YET. I have been hired as the technology-based communications coordinator as they have a goal of utilizing social media "some how." Our president knows Twitter exists but has no idea how it functions. So, I would have to say that a free, easy to read book would look great in his hands. (But only for a few days)

I read the brief preview of the book and can't wait to read the rest. Here's my shot at the answers:
How is your organization currently using Twitter?
Right now, it's just me sending out the tweets to our followers. I try to send out at least one per day, usually an update of our latest blog posts, podcasts, or news about Cleveland/the nonprofit field. I'm currently trying to convince our CEO to join Twitter, since he honestly doesn't have time to blog.

What are your objectives?
We want people to engage with us. In the community, there's a bit of the "Ivory tower" mentality surrounding us, when in fact, we spend more time out and about in the community than people realize. We want to share that news, and let the community and other nonprofit leaders know just how much we want to make a difference.

What audience do you want to reach?
Right now, it's a mixture of other nonprofits, residents of our city, and nonprofit professionals. We'd love to get more Average Joes to follow us and see that we're just as committed to the city and its success as anyone else.

How are you measuring success?
We're looking at followers obviously, not only the number of followers but how many retweets we get and replies. As one person tweeting for an organization, it gets difficult to determine what the voice should be, and even more difficult when people reply to you. We're just looking at Twitter as a conversation tool to see how many people care what we have to say and those that do, do they find it useful or interesting?

Hi Beth,
I'd love to get the free copy of this book! My nonprofit, the American Friends Service Committee, has just started using Twitter. We use it mainly to spark discussions and to increase our public visibility. We're a 92-year old organization, and mostly people under the age of 70 don't recognize our name. We'd like to change that :-)

Our target audience is mainly high school and college age youth, though we've found so far that we're reaching out to several other nonprofits as well.

Our only measure of success that we're actually tracking is our number of followers and following.

It sounds like a book I would love to read. Im just a Twitter novice, but will definitely keep using it. Right now I'm learnig how to get around and how to communicate through this channel. But in the future I will problably use it in a professional context aswell. Thanks for very usefull info and a great blog.
Greetings from Denmark...

Thanks Beth for generating this opportunity to share approaches. If you believe, as I do, that healthy community building is serendipitous, organic, and includes at times ( and this is perhaps counter-intuitive to a normative corporate fear of losing control) self-governed, messy and unstructured behavior, one can appreciate our SAP usage of twitter as having diverse flavors reflecting the diversity of our communities(structured and unstructured). One type of participation would be the bottom up approach that has real people, partners, analysts, customers and employees using twitter for the normal community activities of candidly communicating views, opinions, news, solutions and conversing about them as their own consummate selves. This widespread approach in our community also might be the result of the fact that many of our own folks who use their personal names in twitter, created their twitter accounts quite a while before twitter became so very ubiquitous. A second flavor of use, and a more corporate global communications way of tweeting, would be that of creating broadcast announcements around a particular theme, initiative or solution which is linked to an account name. I've seen folks do this as well, for example: sustainableSAP, SAPCRM.
Additionally we have a twitter channel (SAPNetwork) that people use as an RSS feed that broadcasts updated blog contents and as over 1400 folks subscribe to it for that purpose we may assume they prefer or choose that means of following the latest blog posts despite the fact they could accomplish the same end in a RSS reader.

I notice that a number of companies (Dell, Molson Coors as examples) create multiple tweet accounts with very real and recognizable persons behind them and their twitter names are an amalgam of their company persona and their personal ones. So they speak in a “Dell voice” or a “Molson Coors” voice but it isn’t an anonymous voice. Good synthesis.

Some of our own vibrant community members, (and I dare say they are great in number ) use groups in tools like Tweetdeck to maintain sub community conversations with judicious use of hash tags thrown in.

One of our colleagues @ccmehil created @eventtrack http://eventtrack.info which allows our community (and any other organization or community for that matter) to archive tweets, videos, pictures, mentions around a specific event. This has been used successfully for our own SAP TechEd event and SAPPHIRE and other events of interest to our community that may be entirely outside of SAP.

When we see an event such as our recent SAPPHIRE topping a list of most talked about topics in Twitterdom through hashtags, we can gauge some measure of success in folks use of the twitter medium. My personal opinion is that Twitter is just another good (maybe great) tool that keeps real people connected and engaged around topics that matter to THEM and peoples' good use of it will continue to evolve organically.

My state chapter of AFP is looking to have an educational session on social media, due to pretty much EVERYONE wanting more information on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

We would use this resource in upcoming (probably recurring) session(s) to help educate various organizations' designated social media personnel on how to use Twitter - or better Tweet, if they already are.

I manage our chapter's Annual Giving Roundtable, and the attendance at the "Social Marketing/Media" lunch discussion was double our usual...and ran nearly an hour over, so we're creating an entire half day chapter program to meet the demand for further training.

I thought "I don't think I'm eligible to win again, so I'll just check our library system's database and make sure we've got it." But we don't. No copies in 9 counties, none on the way.

I'm buying The Whuffie Factor to read/donate this week, as part of trying to get some materials available for folks in our decidedly unwealthy rural area to learn about social. (I'm getting ready to teach some classes about Social Media for Grownups at the library and it helps to be able to hold up Actual Books.)

Hi Beth!
We use Twitter so we can know firsthand what our clients experience and so we can help them know the best practices for their npos. We use Twitter so we can connect with others in our space and exchange ideas. Our particular niche is small to mid-size Christian npo/ministries and rather than declare ourselves experts based on our experience in traditional media, we want to watch, learn and do so we are able to help them know best Twitter practices specifically for their ministries. We measure success by the conversations we have on and about Twitter and by the increase in traffic we get on our blog/website. Ultimately success for our clients will be measured by an increase in long-term donor value. For us, it will be measured in word of mouth/referrals.
~Kris

I just entered the world of Twitter on behalf of my company, the YMCA of Edmonton. I'm finding it wonderfully confusing! Our goal is to use Twitter as a positioning tool - to inform people of all the opportunities that exist at the YMCA.

Last month, my school district started daily Twitter updates. @brewsterschools.

My staff members, together with the athletic director leave about 3-5 tweets daily. We have had great feedback from the comminity, and been written up in the local newspaper. I believe that this had increadible potential, and, with so much going on in our distruct, it has been a valuable tool for us.
WE have multiple links on the district page, and explain to people that they can just click the link to see what is going on for those people who do not want to join Twitter.

I work for the Monterey Institute of International Studies and we have been using an organizational Twitter account since January of this year (I myself have been on Twitter since June 2008). At the moment we are using ConnectTweet to pipe in several staff members' Twitter accounts through the organizational feed (only tweets with the hashtag #miis show up on the organizational account).

We would like to use Twitter to generate more online conversation about the Institute. We are mostly trying to reach prospective and current students, but we have found success to be a difficult thing to measure when it comes to the Twittersphere.

Our nonprofit is using Twitter basically to alert about the childhood obesity problem and share good information like articles, posts and presentations related to the subject. This is pretty much the objective for now, but we are thinking to use it for funding raising too. We are trying to reach those interested in the problem and measuring success throught professional contacts, people interested in volunteering and other nonprofits that are finding our organization using Twitter.

How is your organization currently using Twitter? What are your objectives? What audience do you want to reach? How are you measuring success?

We're just getting started with Twitter (@cedcoffice) and are hoping to do some broader non-profit networking, find sage advice for ourselves and our partners (we are a non-profit, but we do non-profit graphic/web design), provide valuable design-related information to potential partners but also non-profits who may never partner with us. Our audience is primarily non-profits that need design help. We are still determining how success will be measured for our Twitter foray -- in the coming months we'll probably look at follows, retweets, links to our site from twitter, and we'd also love any suggestions on how you would measure success?

I definitely need to read this book. I've been using Twitter on behalf of the trade group I help manage, FitLife Club Network, in an attempt to connect with people in the health/fitness industry. It's been tough. In using Twitter personally, I've made great connections with friends and people with similar interests, but the fitness people seem to only be into broadcasting. I'm not sure how to engage in a way that's more meaningful and am wondering if this book may have insight that would help me...

Hi Beth
The Williamson Museum (Georgetown, TX) is currently using Twitter to inform the public about or events, educational programs, and day to day activities at the Museum. We have a big problem with marketing as we are a small nonprofit. Most locals don’t know we are here. Our objective is to use it as a marketing tool through which we can reach a larger audience. We want to inform people of what we do. We want to attract local people (County and surrounding areas) primarily because they are more likely to visit the Museum and to use our resources. We also target local media in the hope of getting our events mentioned on air or retweeted. I had not thought about measuring our success, except in numbers, which I know doesn’t necessarily reflect success.
@williamsonmuse

We tweet our news releases as well as our public affairs department is using twitter to build relationships with non traditional media.
We have many audiences, students, potential students, faculty, media, parents.
We are tracking some of our accounts using hoot suite to see if that is diving any traffic to the site.
@sfupamr or @sfu are a couple of our twitter accounts